Crowdhouse

The first online real estate platform in Switzerland

Crowdhouse is the first Swiss
real estate crowdfunding platform that allows individuals to acquire
shares of rental buildings. With a small investment starting from
CHF 25’000 you can already call yourself co-owner of a property and
benefit from attractive returns.

Crowdhouse approached Ginetta in early 2015 to help them make their market
entry a success. In order to best support them, we built an interdisciplinary team
tasked with designing and implementing their online
identity, the promotional microsite and the online platform itself.

Shape an online identity

Crowdhouse's core business consists of swiss properties. Thus, it was clear from
the start that concepts like city, apartment and floor plans should
be related to its brand.

Crowdhouse defined three key values to describe themselves: democratic,
lucrative and personal. Based on that, the idea behind the logo
emerged: a deconstruction of a simple geometric shape - a square -
represents a property and transports the company’s three key values.

Getting market attention

The microsite was designed to inform potential customers about the benefits of
Crowdhouse and to trigger their interest to invest. Its goal was to generate as many
leads as possible by generating buzz and anticipation for the new platform even
before it was publicly available.

Kickoff workshop.

Content first

In a workshop, the information architecture of the website
as well as the content strategy was discussed.

Engaging experience

In constant collaboration with the client, we evolved from wireframes,
to ux design, to visual design.

From offline to online

We implemented the designs of the microsite through a close collaboration
between the designer, developer and client.

The collaboration with Ginetta was extremely professional.The commitment of the team was extraordinary.

Building the product

The Crowdhouse team already had a lot of experience in the real estate market
in Switzerland. In the past years, they had built trust and acquired loyal customers.
However, our process to transition Crowdhouse from paper to digital wasn’t an easy path.
Our approach to overcome this challenge consisted of three main steps described below.

Grasp the business model and strategy

Understand the Crowdhouse business model and clarify their online strategy.

Personalized icons made to describe the Crowdhouse process.Users can choose the amount to invest.

Recognize potential customers’ needs

Thoroughly analyse the process for offline negotiations and identify
the critical factors to convince potential investors.
Explore ways to display this complex information digitally
in a most simple and appealing way.

Property List

Simplify complex information

Build a clickable prototypes based on our designs and test
them with potential users to iteratively improve the structure
and designs. This allowed us to validate and ensure that
the product was indeed intuitive and convincing.

Offline detail of a property.

Property detail information.

Factors of success

The Crowdhouse online platform was launched in August 2015. By December 2016,
there were more than 8000 registered users and around 100 property investors with
29 million swiss francs invested. Five properties were already
funded and every month a new property is added to the list to be funded.